Betaworks

The future of online media may look like a bleak landscape filled with shallow clickbait and pageview-driven sharing by people who haven’t even read the entire article, but Betaworks CEO John Borthwick says there is still hope for deeper forms of content

Have you played Dots yet? Chances are good that if you downloaded the new game from Betaworks, you’ve played a game or two, since users have now played more than 100 million games since the app launched.

In his annual letter to shareholders of the seed-stage incubator Betaworks, founder and CEO John Borthwick argues that while closed platforms can be valuable in the short term, open systems and services will ultimately prevail.

Known to most for its link shortening service, bitly has raised another $15 million aimed at changing that perception. Bitly, a betaworks company, wants to be the “primary online service for sharing and discovering interesting content.” Look for a new round of hiring to follow.

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick urges publishers to think of what they produce as “information” — not “content” — during a Q&A with GigaOM founder Om Malik at paidContent 2012. Check the video for his take on that plus Google Play, Adobe, Apple and more.

In order to benefit from digital media and the disruption created by the social web, content companies and publishers have to think differently about what they do: it’s not content, it’s information, John Borthwick of Betaworks told attendees at paidContent 2012.

Chartbeat announced a $9.5-million round of funding and a series of new features aimed at giving websites and publishers better insight into how users are engaging with their content, something that has become increasingly important as Facebook becomes a major player in online advertising.

Bit.ly figures if one link is great, why not a bundle? The popular URL shortening service has added a new feature that allows a user to collect multiple links, up to 100, on a single page that can be shared with users.

Yahoo and other web giants have been kicking the tires on New York-based URL shortening service Bit.ly, according to a people in the know. Like many others, Yahoo knows it needs to figure out a way to participate in the emergent real-time and location-aware web.

What makes Twitter so special is also what makes it so infuriating. There isn’t enough context to the information that is flowing through Twitter. A New York-based start-up, SocialFlow wants to change all that with its technology that marries relevance, engagement and big brands.

Former superstar gadget bloggers Peter Rojas and Ryan Block have raised $3.2 million in financing from a group of venture capital firms and private individuals to fund their “crowdsourced” gadget review site, called gdgt. The company says it has hundreds of thousands of registered users.